Yesterday I went onto Lovefilm.com to update my film queue and give a rating for the film I’d just watched (See No Evil with Mia Farrow - a masterclass in suspense), only to be told that the site was having a redesign and would be back up on Sunday October 8th.
So Sunday came and I went to the new Lovefilm site. I almost cried. If the brief for the redesign was to suck every bit of personality from the site and remove any point of difference from what used to be a sweet little site, then it’s a job well done. What we have now is a dull as ditch water site, devoid of any kind of brand personality. Now I’m just presented with some boring square boxes and the obligatory gradients for good measure. So you think to yourself OK, the visual look is awful but maybe they’ve tweaked the site with cool new functionality to make up for it. Nope. In fact they’ve made it worse.
They used to have a really sweet rating system that used a film countdown leader metaphor. Sure it took up more screen real estate, but it was cool and worked beautifully without the need for reloading the page. Now they’ve been replaced with some boring stars - heaven forbid that the public could handle something other than the usual star system - but even worse they don’t work, at least not on Safari on a Mac.
You used to be able to rate films directly in your queue - it was a really nice little feature - so they took it out. And then the final nice touch was to make the site slow down to a crawl - my user experience was awful because of it.
I did worry about Lovefilm being bought by Screen Select and what impact that would have. It was worse than I thought. Why destroy something that worked so well? Yes, move the design on and continue to evolve. But all they’ve done is remove any brand personality and make it conform to everything else out there, in an already crowded marketplace.
I’m now actively looking at ending my Lovefilm subscription and signing up with someone else. Goodbye Lovefilm, I’ll miss you.
Popularity: 33% [?]
what’s the other site’s name that also does the same thing lovefilm does. forgot..
poetry / 11/10/2006